I have such a BAD HABIT of....
Your weekly dose of zen is here to get you by. Take as needed.
Hello my friend!
First, I want to just say thank you again for joining this weekly newsletter & for allowing mindfulness into your life.
It brings joy to my heart knowing there are others in this world who also turn to mindfulness as a tool to use in enhancing their lives. So truly, it’s great having you here.
The aim of this email is to provide mindfulness to you in ways that can help support you in any of your goals or life purposes, while helping you to also achieve & maintain a little zen, too. 💫
THIS may just be the ONLY mindfulness email YOU will ever need or want in your inbox.
I’ll be sure to have something worthy in there for you to open every Monday at 9am (or whenever you decide to look at it).
So enjoy my friend!
** BTW I just found out you can reply to these emails directly. And that excites me lol. Im always down to chat & go over anything I covered, any mindfulness or meditation questions, or simply just connect & get to know you more. If that’s something you’d like to do, feel FREE and just respond to the email(s).
***ALSO, if you haven’t already you can join the private group on FB where we can get conversations going & talk about important & meaningful topics or ideas as it relates to us or the world. Plus, I’d rather talk too you, not at you.
So come talk to me, lol.**
[(Oh yeah & I renamed the group to Zen space :)]
THE POWER OF HABIT
—OK! Real quick, as a reminder because I feel this is SO important:
Mindfulness is NOT a quick fix.
It’s not something where you take a few breaths and all your problems are gone).
It take timmeeeeeeee to notice a change occurring. And a lot of practice.
You really start seeing the “effects” of what it’s like, when you’ve been practicing at it for a few weeks
so pretty much, when you’ve made a habit out of it.
It’s also not meant to be this blissful, magical experience. 😮
And the goal of mindfulness isn’t to eliminate negative experiences or to think more positively.
Mindfulness helps us to simply become more aware of our present moment.
It shifts us out of autopilot, where we’re constantly going & doing, and awakens us to the here & now— the moment where we have choice to find a little stillness and feel peace of mind.
It’s soo important to recognize & try to understand this.
“The goal of mindfulness isn’t to eliminate negative experiences or to think more positively. Mindfulness helps us to simply become more aware.”
Here’s the LOC breakdown for you to preview what you’re getting in this email (at a glance):
Mindful Insights
(1)A must watch 5 minute video spoken by Alan Watts on “CHOICE” & tbh it’s worth every minute (2) found a couple of really effective sleep apps that can help you feel less tired all the time if you struggle with sleep (3) Another 5-minute video on how to break a bad habit. Very Powerful watch. (4) A great article I read the other day explaining “the window of tolerance,” & what we can do to expand our ability to be less reactive, less judgmental, and more present in our everyday life.
Mindful Weekly Challenge
(This week I shared a fun & simple activity, or challenge called “walking down the street.” The purpose of this challenge is to help us identity some of the patterns or automatic behaviors that we have.)
Mindful Approach
(diving into the next pillar —automaticity & mindfulness —this is all about how the patterns and habits we’ve developed over time impact the way we currently live our lives).
Mindful Reflection
(Reflected on a quote by Victor Frankl that I came across the other day & thought I’d share my reflection here with you)
Mindful Insights
1) This will automatically shift your perspective. Hope you enjoy as much as I did listening to this.
2) Do you struggle with sleep?
Sometimes I find that I do, but I found these two powerful apps & have been using them for awhile now to help me fall asleep faster. It’s been extremely helpful & so if this is something for you, check them out. And best of alll, they are FREEEEEE :)
—>Insight timer
—>Calm
3) This is a short video by Dr. Judson Brewer sharing 4 very insightful steps on how to break a bad habit. Only 5 min. Worth the watch—
4) Have you ever heard of “window of tolerance?” If not, it’s okay, this article briefly describes it (& there’s a picture below that describes it well too) and it also talks about how we can strengthen our tolerance to being present more often —> window of tolerance article
Mindful Challenge
[Give this exercise a try when you have no distractions, feeling calm, & have time to be fully present with it]
Now when you are ready, imagine the following scenario as vividly as possible:
“Imagine walking along a street that you are very familiar with. Now imagine as you look up, you notice that there is someone you know on the other side of the road. You smile & wave, but the person doesn’t respond. The person just continues to walk without giving you the slightest reaction….”
Now reflect on these questions:
As you were imagining the scenario, what thoughts did you notice?
What emotions did you notice?
What body sensations did you notice?
Was there a link between your thoughts, your feelings, &/or emotions and body sensations?
Were there thoughts that created certain feelings and/or emotions or body sensations?
I’ll post these questions, along with the scenario in the fb group. I’d love to hear about your experience and learn about what kind of things come up for you.
If you haven’t joined yet, you can join now by clicking —> (join here)
Mindful Approach
Last week, we finished talking about attention & present moment awareness.
Within the email, I included a body scan meditation for you to try & practice. Did you get to try it out? If so, how’d it go? If you didn’t practice, what prevented you from doing so?
Practices, like the body scan are useful as they can provide us many benefits towards improving our lives. One or two practices may not be enough, but by creating a consistent and daily practice for ourselves, over time, we start to feel the difference in our lives.
It’s best to form a habit out of it.
By creating a daily practice, we’re training the brain to pick up on these patterns so that it can learn to start automatically prompting us, without us having to second think.
Once we make a habit out of these practices, it becomes a lot easier to stick to it.
It’s a whole to do but it’s worth it.
And since on the topic, ever notice how our mind has the tendency to automatically react to certain things?
Or how it creates its own stories about something even with little information available to prove the story to be correct?
Like for instance, maybe you did try the body scan meditation, but maybe you found that it “didn’t work.” And because that’s so, you automatically react—got upset, discouraged, & gave up. Your mind created a story probably saying, “fuck it, meditation just isn’t for me.”
Sound familiar?
The issue most ppl tend to have when it comes to personal growth or becoming more mindful involves automatic patterns or habits of ours that are difficult to break.
Without becoming aware of these patterns, change is difficult if not impossible.
And so THIS is where mindfulness fits.
Paying mindful attention to automatic reactions and routine patterns of thinking and behavior is a powerful way to decrease their impact and make room for CHOICE.
Not all automatic behaviors are considered “bad,” though.
The bright side to automatic patterns is it frees up space for us to do more.
For example, the process of driving can become highly automatic through repetition. This is great because it allows us to be able to drive, have a conversation with a passenger at the same time monitor traffic, change gears (if our car is standard), adjust the rear view mirror, etc.
The dark side—
And then there’s some automatic patterns that can negatively influence our wellbeing.
For example, when an external event occurs & is followed by an unconscious & automatic reaction, (car on the highway cuts us off, before processing it, we respond by getting angry, beeping the horn, swearing into the void, getting all worked up) it can become difficult to separate the objective event from our subjective thoughts or emotions that it creates.
Over time, these automatic & impulsive reactions may cause a lack of control which can lead to so many problems, such as anxiety, depression, & addiction.
To rid these negative patterns from our lives, instead of doing what we typically do, which is acting too quickly without considering the consequences of our actions, we can instead pause, take a FULL breathe & collect ourselves.
We take notice on what’s occurring. We can ask ourselves—
“How am I feeling right now?”
“What body sensations are arising right now?”
“What thoughts am I experiencing?”
“How can I shift the way I perceive this moment?”
The power lies within ourselves. It’s just allowing ourselves to tap into that power & then sticking to it.
And how would that happen? Through consistent practice. And it makes sense as this goes with anything in life. I mean think about how you learned to drive a car….practice. You get better through time & consistency. That’s the BIG secret with this.
And with that…I’ll wrap it up here.
For today and for the rest of the week, see if you can form a habit for yourself by taking on the body scan practice that I created. (I’ll drop the link below and you can also find the meditation on my YouTube channel— iamzenrn).
See what happens if you go into it without the old patterned way of thinking. Remember to be easy on yourself, don’t judge your experience as good or bad, and just be in the moment, no matter what it may look or feel like. ❤️
**NEXT WEEK— We will carry on with this topic. I’ll also share another meditation (seated meditation) with you that supports this idea of “automaticity,” that I feel you may enjoy. I’ll also share a little about the pitfalls (or issues) that tend to arise when it comes to meditation.
body scan meditation
Mindful Reflection
“Between stimulus and response there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
— vicktor frankl
I came across this quote while on reddit the other day, and it really hit home.
How many times have we reacted & then regretted it immediately afterwards?
How many times have we made someone feel bad for not taking the time to just pause before responding?
If we just breathe; or close our eyes; or even just count to ten after receiving some kind of stimulus from our outside world, how might our day or year or life change? How might it make alll the difference?
I think that if we just take moments to pause before reacting & just allow ourselves some space to clear our mind, to be in the present moment, to recalibrate, to then decide fully & accept how we want to respond, we then allow ourselves room to grow & flourish into our true authentic selves.
The power lies between the stimulus & our response.
What are your thoughts on this quote? Did it resonate with you? What about the email collectively? Did you get some value from it?
Feel free to share your thoughts with me. You can reply to this email, or if you’d prefer we can get a conversation going on the private group I created for us on Facebook
Until next time my friend,
NAMASTE.
I’m Victor.
Or the mindfulness guy.
I aim to find calm & balance in my life through inspirations between alternative Eastern traditional Buddhism styles of meditation & mindfulness, as well as modern secular styles too.
I believe that we ALL have the capacity to create greatness for ourselves & I’m willing to show you how.
you can find me hanging out on:
Instagram —@2whomitmayconcrn_
Facebook — @iamzenrn
TikTok — @iamzenrn
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https://www.iamzenrn.com
~I’m here to hold space for you because you deserve it.~
Victor Padilla